NYC Public Advocate candidates: their council district performance – part 2
In the universe of quality-of-life issues, lack of heat and/or hot water in the dead of winter rank high. To those with inadequate or no heat or hot water. In terms of number of complaints, it ranks as the most or the second-most frequent complaint along with noise, depending on the neighborhood. Unlike noise, it correlates highly with median income. That is, you are more likely to get more complaints about heat and hot water north of 96th Street on Park Avenue than south of it. Perhaps a truism, but it leads into the next graphic which shows the relative rates at which these complaints are resolved (= “fixed”) in the council districts of the candidates for Public Advocate who also serve (or served) on the council:
A little messy and hard to read or interpret. Clearly 2012 marks a turning point of some kind and resolution rates dropped across the board in the last two years of Mayor Bloomberg’s last term and into the first year-and-a-half or two years of Mayor de Blasio’s term. Let’s ignore that busy-ness and look only at the last term of the city council from 2014 to 2017, both inclusive, along with a city-wide average.
Te picture is a little more clear. All five were on the council during those years, we are looking at percentages, not absolute numbers, so the comparison is strictly equal. Councilmember Ydanis Rodriguez’s district stands out, averaging lower than the city till 2015, and then turning around sharply and more steeply than NYC as a whole, to finish 2017 well above the city average. CMs Williams, Speaker Mark-Viverito and Espinal’s districts, on the other hand, did better than the city from 2014 to the end of 2016, then slipping below the city average.
So who made a difference to their constituents when it comes to heat and hot water? There is no definitive answer given that three of them went below average in 2015 and one went sharply above. Perhaps CM Rodriguez has an edge. Only CM Ulrich’s district has consistently underperformed the city on heat and hot water resolutions.
To those interested in the top complaint in each of these candidates’ districts, check back here later and I will post a table.
311 data from NYC Open Data downloaded at various times. Parsed in RStudio v1.1.453 on R v3.3.3
